Secondary Server/Direct Print Monitor/Print Provider Troubleshooting

Help! I’ve set up a PaperCut Secondary Server (or the Direct Print Monitor) but the printers are not showing up in the PaperCut Admin Console under the Printers tab, or jobs are not showing up in the job log for that printer. What can I check?

When you install the PaperCut Secondary Server or Direct Print Monitor, printers should start showing up immediately in PaperCut and print jobs should be tracked. If that’s not happening, it could be because of a misconfiguration or connectivity issue.

Under the hood, both of these features run the as a service called the PaperCut Print Provider. Throughout this article may see some of these terms used interchangeably.

Confirm Connectivity

1. From the secondary server, confirm that you can access the Primary server by either:

Test a telnet connection to the Primary server:

• simply type: telnet servername 9191 at a command prompt.
• If you receive an error like Could not open connection to host, then there is probably a network/firewall issue not letting the connection through.
• If the screen goes blank then the connection was established successfully. Press Ctrl+] then type quit to close the telnet session.

or try to access the PaperCut Admin console from the secondary server:
http://[IP address of the Primary App Server]:9191/admin

2. Ensure that the necessary ports are opened on any firewall software or devices on the network, as detailed here: Firewall Configuration - Ports Used by PaperCut.

Confirm Secondary Server installation and config:

3. Confirm that you have installed the same version of secondary server software as the Primary Application is running. The secondary server is installed as per the Configuring Secondary Print Servers and Locally Attached Printers section of the manual.

You can download previous versions of PaperCut (to match the version that you’re running on the Primary App Server) from this link: https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/PastVersions

4. Confirm that the connection details in the print-provider.conf file is correct, as detailed in Step 4 of the install instructions.

The config file is located here: [app-path]\providers\print\[platform]\print-provider.conf

Tip: If you’re running on Windows, and the changes you make to the config file are not being saved, you may need to run Notepad with Administrator privileges - Find ‘notepad’ in your Start menu, then right-click and select ‘Run as Administrator’. When notepad opens, use the ‘File → Open’ menus from that instance of notepad to open and edit the .conf file above, then save the file and re-open to confirm the connection information has saved correctly.

5. Restart the ‘PaperCut Print Provider’ service (Windows), or restart the secondary server to pick up any changes made above.

6. If you’re running the secondary server on Mac OS, confirm that the printer has been enabled for PaperCut monitoring by performing the steps to Add a new printer on a Mac

7. Check the Print Provider logs in [app-path]\providers\print\[platform]\print-provider.log to see if there are any errors listed, and to confirm that it is monitoring the local print queues.

Check the Admin Console:

8. Check that the Printer on the secondary server is appearing in the ‘Printers’ tab in the PaperCut administration console - otherwise, re-check the steps above, and then enable debug in the Print Provider and send the log files through to PaperCut Support, along with a full description of the issue, and any supporting information like screenshots / IP address of primary server / printer name of the printer not appearing and any other useful information.

9. Check that jobs sent to the print queues on the secondary server are appearing under Printers → [select secondary server print queue] → Job Log. If they are not, try pausing the print queue on the secondary server at the Operating System level, and send another job to the print queue. Confirm that the job shows up as paused in the print queue on the server. If not, check through the troubleshooting steps to determine why Jobs are not being tracked.

Also see…

• Where can I get the secondary server software?
• Secondary Print Server version does not match the primary server version
• Print Jobs not being tracked by PaperCut